In 2000 the DEEM program
underwent review by the EPA FIFRA Scientific
Advisory Panel and was approved for use
by EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs
(OPP) at that time. In order to prepare
for this review a complete disclosure of
all of DEEM’s computational algorithms
was made public. DEEM was the first dietary
exposure program used by EPA’s OPP
to receive the approval of the SAP.
DEEM-FCID
In an effort to make their
exposure analysis process more public and
transparent, EPA in the late 1990’s
worked with USDA to produce a new set of
“recipes” (translation factors)
for use with the DEEM program that could
be publicly released. (The translation factors
used to develop the DEEM dietary intake
database from the CSFII up to that time
were proprietary.) The FCID (Food Commodity
Intake Database) was originally generated
applying those new public domain recipes
to the 1994-96, 1998 CSFII by the USDA.
EPA contracted with Novigen Sciences in
2001 to review those recipes and the FCID
database, develop improved foodforms for
a number of items, and have Durango Software
LLC regenerate the FCID database of RAC/FF
intake amounts for all individuals in the
1994-96, 1998 CSFII. This new FCID database
became the basis for a new version of DEEM,
called DEEM-FCID, first released in 2001.
The FCID database generated
by Durango Software LLC and incorporated
into DEEM-FCID was exhaustively reviewed
by EPA scientists and became the new basis
for conducting their dietary exposure assessments.
This FCID database, in ASCII flat file form,
is now publicly available from the EPA (although
there may still be some discrepancy as to
which file is being made available, the
original USDA version or the corrected Durango
Software version) [Link]. A valuable addition
to DEEM-FCID was the inclusion of direct
and indirect water intake data by source
(tap, bottled, other, and source unknown),
based on an analysis of the 1994-96, 1998
CSFII dietary intake database performed
by SAIC for EPA. [Link]
